1. Innocence of Muslims

The most controversial movie of 2012 was hardly a film. Baldly and badly produced, it had all the amateurish aura of a sexploitation film from the 1970s, but without any real titillation. Innocence of Muslims was ostensibly a bio-pic of the Prophet Muhammad that had straight-to-video (or worse) written all over it. One of its actors was a head-tattooed former porn star; its producer was a Coptic-American con man with too many aliases, out on parole following a variety of fraud and narcotics offenses. But Innocence of Muslims‘ deprecatory depiction of the founder of Islam turned out to be an epic piece of mischief. The movie was perfectly timed for a divisive U.S. presidential campaign that was all too eager for weapons of cultural warfare; clips from the film were propagated by the usual suspects, including the Florida pastor and publicity hound who burned a Koran last year. The usual suspects on the other side (firebrands in the Islamic world who despise Western influence) inflamed their constituents, leading to a siege of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and — possibly — an excuse for militants in Benghazi to overrun the U.S. diplomatic compound in that eastern Libyan city, resulting in the death of the American ambassador. As for the producer of Innocence, Nakoula Bassely Nakoula (a.k.a. Mark Bassely, a.k.a. Sam Bacile) pleaded guilty to four counts of parole violation and was sentenced to one year in jail.